Hannah VanderHart
The Farm
My grandfather, Ansil Lancelot Hethcox, owned and operated the second largest chicken farm in Louisiana. There were two divisions: Western Hatchery and Ruston Broiler Producers. One for the production of eggs, and one for fryers. A newspaper clipping from 15 February, 1959, unearthed by my brother Ansil,[1]tells the story of the farm’s beginning:
Industry
EROS, La. (Special) — A new industry for this locality, an egg farm, is just begining to produce hatching eggs. Mr. and Mrs. Ben Hethcox who came here last summer and settled in the Frantom Chapel community some five miles from Eros are managing the farm for their son, Lance Hethcox. They have 13,000 White Rock layers six months old this week. They have 2,000 roosters of same breed. The first egg at this plant was laid January 9. At this time some 800 per day are being produced.
You couldn’t write a better line of direction or description than “some five miles from Eros.” A short enough distance to see whatever Eros burns in the air, and for the smoke to drift your way, but not close enough to speak with anyone from Eros. Not close enough to know Eros. Like an island you can see from the shore of another island only because you can see the clouds that obscure the island itself. When I read the town’s name for the first time, I pronounced it as the Greek word for love, Eros. When I heard my mother say the town’s name, the word flattened and became a place: heiress, I thought she said. It was not Greek, it was ordinary. Yet there is one form of love written in its very spelling.
Our family has such small receipts accounting for my grandfather’s life, ended in 1971 by a heart attack at the age of fifty-two, at the family breakfast table. The few newspaper clippings are of the hatchery, as this one. And yet, there is much story in the slight, justified text of this newspaper clipping. This is the story, literally, of the first egg laid the month before.
My father would have been 11 years old, his younger brother Ronnie, 8, his sister Lana, 5. There is a closeness to the family narrative of this clipping—my grandfather’s parents were his farm managers at the time, a highly engaged and demanding role for Bennie and Ola Hethcox to hold. The first egg was laid four months before my father’s 11thbirthday, in May. This inclusion of the first egg is held up, proudly, like the first dollar a store earns, framed and displayed on the wall.
In November 1960, a year and a half later, another column runs in the paper, this one five small paragraphs. The title: “Western Will Continue Their Operation Here.” In it, my grandfather “assures” the paper, “We are definitely in the chicken hatching and raising business to stay…we need every baby chick and finished broiler we can lay our hands on.” According to the article, the Chubby Chick poultry plant in Arcadia has closed down “under a lease agreement with J&M Poultry company of El Dorado and Alexandria.” That is, the smaller, local company was bought out by a larger (and more geographically distant) poultry company. “The only change in the Ruston operation,” the column notes, “is that their broilers are being shipped to Alexandria and El Dorado for processing rather than Arcadia.” The month before this story runs, the more optimistically-titled article, “Western One of Top Parish Broiler Producers” ran, indicating the changing and political nature of even the chicken farming business in Louisiana.
Eros, out of all the Greek loves, is known for its mutable nature—erotic love, sensual, the distillation of desire. Eros blows, and you blow with it. As the poet Philip Sidney noted, love is the horse riding you.[2]Eros does not account for the movement of chickens in Northern Louisiana, yet love is adjacent to the story that takes place some five miles away.
The Chicken
That first egg at my grandfather’s farm would have been gold-brown. The White Rock (also known as the White Plymouth Rock) is the classic American chicken, its feathers described by one hatchery as “brilliant white as fresh snow.” As chicks, White Rocks are yellow-white and look like they belong in a ribboned Easter basket. As adults, they have red combs. They are almost certainly the white chicken William Carlos Williams was thinking of when he wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow”:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
My mother doesn’t like white chickens, whether Leghorns or White Rocks, as a breed. She says they look “dirty” (chickens love a good dust bath), and prefers shades of brown and red—Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons—or the black and white stripes of Barred Rocks. She prefers a brown egg, too, although she sometimes admits the pale blue eggs laid by Ameraucanas into her flock. I feel like I should have more to say about the years and years when my family raised chickens; my whole childhood at home, and past when I was in college. More to say about the broiler days, and the moveable yard pens—a system designed by the owner of Polyface Farm in Staunton, Virginia, whose farm we visited during the height of our chicken raising. The idea was that you put the chickens in the bottomless wire pens, which you then rotated around your yard, and the chicken shit fertilized the ground for you while the chickens had new grass each week. This method is optimistic about how hard chickens are on the ground (the broilers, bred to put on weight at an extraordinary pace, quickly grow too large to walk, and shuffle on their bellies, caking their breasts with their own shit), and how much space you have to give. Our chicken yard—fenced in, wide, looked as though larger and wilder animals had stomped the ground to dust. Blessed be the chicken who found a grub in thatpacked earth.
I should have more to say about the butchering days, the laying days, the incubators hatching in the spring days. The days my mother wormed the chickens, or clipped their wings. The chicken house on stilts, like the house of Baba Yaga, that my father and church friends built in Catlett, Virginia. My mother loved that raised chicken house. The last home my parents bought in Virginia (my father was military, and we moved, but always returned, to Virginia) had a bona fide barn, with all the low-roofed, dark charms of a barn that houses chickens. Not a barn with a clean and airy hayloft, as my closest friend had, growing up. I should have more to say about chickens, but it is the egg I love.
The Egg
“A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.” Bilbo’s riddle for Gollum in Tolkien’s The Hobbitseems as archetypal as the egg itself. An egg is a little sun—hidden, protected. It grows quite gold if you feed your hens corn-based scratch. If we can imagine the planets as turning on great wheels, the stars in their primum mobile, or the earth as held together by the roots of the World-Tree, then why cannot the sun be our best and greatest egg? The sun as the yolk to the moon’s white, hidden behind a glowing shell. Egg is promise, is life. Egg can be spoilt, crushed, left too long alone. Best of all, egg is beginning. Out of it, comes a farm, a family, my father, my mother.
For me, the egg is history. Laid some five miles from Eros, the egg and the happenstance of a town called Eros beckon me to the writing of Anne Carson. In her collaged, fanfold elegy for her brother Michael, Nox, Carson wrote this:
History and elegy are akin. The word ‘history’ comes from an ancient Greek verb…meaning ‘to ask.’ One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.[3]
The egg—what it carries inside, and who carries it—is a metaphor for the historian’s activity, suggests Carson. But it is also a metaphor for the poet, the essayist, the story writer: that golden, hidden impetus to write, and the writing itself. What you contain inside, and what can be broken out of you.
For the farmer, it is not a metaphor. It is an egg.
Carson quotes Hekataios, ancient Greek writer of the text How to Go Around the Earth,
He makes out of myrrh an egg as big as he can carry. Then he tests it to see if he can carry it. After that he hollows out the egg and lays his father inside and plugs up the hollow. With father inside the egg weighs the same as before. Having plugged it up he carries the egg to Egypt to the temple of the sun.[4]
Carson points out that Hekataios is describing the sacred phoenix—but I admire, too, that Hekataios describes something very common, even ordinary. In the egg-like hollows of our bodies, we hold our family tree. We hold the soils it grew (and grows) in. For good and ill, those branches run through us.
Yet we can choose what to hold, and what to carry—what to put down.
The egg will always be, poetically and realistically, concerned with beginning.
For me, that beginning is some five miles from Eros.
[1]My brother has always regretted not having the middle name of Lancelot and going by “Lance,” as our grandfather did.
[2]Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 59: “I on my horse, and Love on me, doth try / Our horsemanships, while by strange work I prove / A horseman to my horse, a horse to Love…”
[3]Ann Carson, Nox.
[4]Ibid.